Different from the previous studies of the vortex-induced vibration (VIV) dominated by first mode of flexible pipe in an oscillatory flow, the features of a higher mode dominated are experimentally investigated in the ocean basin. The flexible pipe is forced to harmonically oscillate with different combinations of a period and amplitude. The design dominant mode consists of first and second modes under the maximum reduced velocity (V_R) of approximately 5.5 with a KC number ranging from 22 to 165. The VIV responses between only the excited first mode and the excited higher mode are compared and studied using displacement reconstruction and wavelet transform methods. The discrepancies of spatial and temporal response between smaller and larger KC numbers (KC = 56 and 121) are first observed. The strong alternate mode dominance and lock-in phenomena occur in the case of larger KC numbers, while they cannot be observed in the case of smaller KC numbers under higher modes. The VIV dominant frequency in the in-line (IL) direction is found to be always triple the oscillatory flow frequency and not twice that in the cross flow (CF) direction. The dominant frequency in the CF direction can be predicted by the Strouhal law, and the Strouhal number is approximately 0.18 under V_R = 5.5, which is not affected by the excited mode. Moreover, differences of response motion trajectory are also revealed in this paper. The present work improves the basic understanding of vessel motion induced VIV and provides helpful references for developing prediction methods of VIV in an oscillatory flow.